I entertained a man-of-town at the mansion over the week-end. He was a rather shabby sort, a fellow one might see rooting about the waste-bins on Avenue T, that part of the wharf where the crab-smashers raise their mighty mallets and bring them down on crustaceans with nary a care for who’s walking besides or who might be gifted with the (rather prodigious) by-splatter of oils and shell-bits and general meaty leavings that cling to every nearby surface in a quite inextricable manner.

My guest, a certain Mr. N_____, tried to keep his left side angled away from me throughout the evening, afraid, perhaps, that the tell-tale crabbings that stained his trousers would reveal him as a member of the loathsome cobblestone set, the type too proud to ask for proper crab-scraps from the smashers (a generally amenable class) yet too poor to buy even an eighth-ounce of rat-juice from the bellman’s cart with the streamers, where the rats from the previous night’s trappings are pressed and juiced with great fanfare at sunrise, the breeze plucking at the gay streamers and lofting the bellman’s ancient shanty from rooftop to rooftop in a great, old hallmark of morning…

Taking the tropes of Conan Doyle-style adventure fiction and ramping them way over the top, this tale brings together:

Ghosts (of course)

Airships

High society intrigue

Old men in salt barrels

Horses that cannot fly

Frightful moustaches aplenty

Cheese handling as an artform

General bad decisions, and

Casual mass murder

All in a stunningly-designed package evocative of the grandest pulp style. Praised by many for its strangeness and wonder, Dispatches from Wondermark Manor is offered here for the very first time in a 500-page omnibus edition, including all three volumes of the novels (previously available only as long-out-of-print chapbooks) plusa separate prologue (originally published in the book Beards of our Forefathers) as well as three brand-new hand-drawn maps of the locales in the story.

Buy with confidence! This edition is guaranteed at least 48% opium-free by law.

To see if it’s something you might like, I’ve made the complete Volume 1 (i.e. the first 137 pages of the new book) available for free. If you like it, and you want to read more, grab the complete print edition for 363 more pages!